


With Gentleness and Time

by fluffernutter8



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:41:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7644988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve comes out of the ice much earlier. He doesn't remember anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Gentleness and Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joyfulnerd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joyfulnerd/gifts).



> Title from St. Francis de Sales.

Steve didn’t remember her when he woke up. Howard had warned that this was a possibility, after the crash and all that time under the water. (Six years, frozen and alone- thinking about it made her press her mouth together against a tremble.) 

They still didn’t have a comprehensive understanding of the serum and what it could do. Howard said that Steve’s brain might be fine, that it might heal itself as his outer wounds were beginning to. But the memories also might come back slowly, or in pieces, or not at all.

It was times like this that Peggy reminded herself that Howard, brilliant and innovative and likely a leading authority on Erskine’s research, was an engineer and not a doctor. She held out hope.

They had him in one of Howard’s facilities, recuperating with private nurses who had no idea who he was. Before they had found him, Howard had wanted to have it in headlines, a boon for the country and Stark Industries. As soon as he saw Steve, nearly inanimate on the bed, the blankets draped as if they weren’t quite interacting with his mass, like he was between worlds, he had never mentioned it again. He helped Peggy shave off Steve’s hair, leaving only the darker roots, and they let his beard grow so even as his face healed, he would be hard to recognize.

The beard was still growing in when Steve opened his eyes for the first time. He woke up scratching at it, Peggy watching from her customary chair.

She took his hand between both of hers. “Steve,” she said, her voice gentle in a way that her SHIELD staff might not believe. She was already known for being a bit hard-nosed, but the past few weeks she had been unusually dour and snappish.

Steve looked back at her, groggy and a little wary, but mostly confused. “Your name is Steve,” Peggy said, pressing his hand and forcing down disappointment. She had him, even if he remembered nothing, and that needed to be enough.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She shut her eyes for a moment so that she could smile as she told him, “I’m Peggy.”

He smiled hesitantly back. There was no recognition at all.

It had to be enough.

* * *

After three weeks, he began pushing- politely, solidly- to leave Howard’s property. They had SHIELD safe-houses but no guarantee that he would remain hidden there. Instead, Peggy went into the account she had set aside, his salary from the war quietly accruing interest, and used it to get him an apartment.

He didn’t speak very much, but he was observant and no fool.

“Am I a criminal? Are we hiding because I’m on the lam?” he asked her, barely joking, when she stopped in one evening. They had decided that he needed his memories back on his own, or not at all. The story they had told him so far was simple: he had been to war and been injured, had lost his memories. They were his colleagues from that time. She had said nothing about the ache of seeing his eyes light up when he saw her, but with only a fraction of history behind them. Nothing of downed flags and awkward car rides past Brooklyn back alleys, no mention of clandestine missions or keepsake compasses or missed dances. She pretended she didn’t know what his face looked like under moonlight when it was the two of them on watch, that she had no inkling of the way his mouth felt pressed against hers.

“There might be a bit of a buzz around you, so we wanted to keep you inconspicuous while you settle in, but you’re not a criminal,” Peggy told him. “You’re a war hero.”

“A war hero?” He sounded bemused, beyond disbelief at the idea, more like she might be having him on.

“Yes,” she said firmly, because the idea of Steve not knowing even that he had made a difference, that he had changed history infinitely for the better, was too much. She turned away so he would not ask more questions, but she needed to tell him that. She had sacrificed enough.

* * *

Not long after that, he came to her and asked if she had a job for him. She had hoped that with room to find his own way, he might blaze an entirely new and different life than he might have tried before, but somehow he seemed to orbit his same familiar paths. He had read up on the war and the conflict with the Soviets, and although she had never discussed it with him, he seemed to know that she was mixed up in it all.

She should have turned him away. If the agents they were training were going to be any good, they should recognize Steve, even with the beard he now neatly maintained, and his dyed brown hair, and hornrims. And Steve deserved time away from this world. He had, in the ways that counted, given his life in service of his country.

“I’ve been looking for a new assistant,” she found herself saying instead. “Someone I can trust to help me keep track of things, and who is capable enough for some more dangerous situations.”

“I think I can do that,” said Steve, and shook her hand.

* * *

The version of Steve she had now was different. Not like she had fallen through the looking glass, but like she was staring at him through the murk of the ocean. He still sketched, restless and fine, but Brooklyn was just where he happened to live now, its streets no more meaningful than Yonkers or Pensacola or Copenhagen.

He was quieter now, slower to anger. She found that irritating on occasion, the way she was alone in her rising temper while he looked stoically into her face.

But his instincts were still there, the core of him, protective and upright and honest. He stepped in during fights on the street. She found herself consulting him about nuclear testing and new measures against Soviet spies, the times she wondered how much of the world they had saved together would be destroyed at their hands.

One night, she went to meet an informant, someone who was expecting only her. She told Steve to wait around the corner. The first bullet through the window caught her source in the throat. The second was a diversion, meant to make her move into the path of the third, which would have left her without some fairly essential brain matter. Instead she found herself on the ground, Steve’s breath matching hers. The grin he gave her made her stare for a moment, sure that this was her Steve, with his sly subversions and smart remarks. But it was gone the next minute as he said dutifully, “I know you told me to wait outside.”

“I think I shall find it in myself to forgive you,” she said, tucking her fingers against his arm. The steadfast weight of him: enough, easily enough.

* * *

“I think I might need to be reassigned,” he said in her office, several days later.

She looked up at him standing on the other side of her desk. “Are you not being challenged enough?” she asked, a bit brusque. She didn’t quite have time for his insecurities just now.

“No,” he said. “No, Peggy, the job is fine. But I think I might not be the best for it because,” she recognized the steely set of his shoulders. “Because if I’m going to keep you safe, I shouldn’t feel the way I do about you. It’s dangerous.”

“Steve.” She felt an affection for him, clear and deep. “I trust you. A person who would care this much about my safety is a person I very much want on my side, at my back. And I believe you’ll find that you are not the only one concerned when the two of us are in the field together.”

His eyes widened and blinked. The memories of before, of their unspoken but understood feelings, rose ghostly in her mind and disappeared as he said, “If that’s true, can I- Could we- Would you-”

“Tuesday night, at eight o’clock,” she said firmly. “I’ll meet you at yours.”

* * *

Their first date, he took her to see Singing in the Rain, and they found themselves humming the songs all through ice cream afterward. For their second, they went for dim sum in Chinatown because he knew that she had traveled and wanted to take her somewhere that offered more than steak and potatoes. He took her dancing for their third, and although she smiled through it and kept her shoulders relaxed, she thought he could tell that something wasn’t right, because the next week they went to see Angie in The Pirates of Penzance, although they had each already seen it.

Steve walked her home afterward, hand in quiet hand, and she felt contentment come over her so that it was almost like panic, the security of it after all that time.

“Would you come in?” she said at the door, not caring if her neighbors saw and whispered. Most people in her life called her Director Carter now. She had lost Steve and lost him and found him again. Let them whisper.

“Sure,” he said, and stepped inside.

She kissed him in the dim hallway before he had even hung up his coat, and it was like present and memory at once. But after a moment she felt something wrong in him, a shudder, a breathlessness, and she pulled back.

“Steve?” she said. His eyes caught the window light, widened, and she touched his arm.

“You were in a car,” he said, wondering. “Phillips was driving and I was about to get on the plane.”

“Yes.” His breathlessness had caught over to her. The gently urgent need choked her. “Steve, what else do you remember?”

He held a hand to his head, collapsed backward like loose stitching. “Everything…the train and the cold and the boys…God, Bucky, you…” He looked up at her. “Everything. Everything.”

She kissed him again- it seemed the only thing to do- and there were tears on his cheeks when she moved away, but there was a smile too, a breast-pocket smile that belonged to her, that had been waiting months and years, and she knew it matched the one on her face too.

Because Steve, this Steve, any Steve, was enough, always, always, but it was the history of them that she could now see in his face that brought out the hidden part of her and made it bloom.


End file.
